So long as the jobs don’t change. If they do, then your individual forklift driver is S.O.L. I’d argue that many of these guys are only getting by even today because of government intervention and make work schemes.
If that happens to enough people, then that’s the kind of thing that revolutions are made out of. Since such events almost always end up in less freedom, I’d rather not go through that.
it is sad that this boogey man has been scaring people for hundreds of years. we have hundreds of years of hard evidence - the more machines - the richer society -
I can’t wait until robots do everything and we can sit on the beach all day and finally read HA
I’d support the invention of supertechnology for 10% of the population over supertechnology for 0% of the population. People might be angry that they don’t have supertech, but you’d have to be misanthropic to choose equal poverty.
I don’t know if a gradual transition to freedom is relevant to this conversation. Supertech might be invented in our lifetimes under socialism.
Do you agree that our brains follow the laws of physics? Do you believe that there is something magical or mysterious about them? If you don’t, then you must accept that the human brain, and everything that it can do, will one day be computable and artificially mimicked, even if by brute force alone.
You are probably right over the very long run, but there are going to be a lot of unhappy forklift drivers and the like in the meantime. The effects could be much more profound than even the industrial revolution. The whole nature of rapid technological change is that it is very hard to predict the outcomes, but we can see that they will be rapid, and large. I’ll look at the link that you provided; thanks for sharing.
If the end result is that everything is automated (even the robots even self maintained and repaired themselves) and there was no need for human labor at all. Prices would be so dirt cheap that it’d be the simplest thing ever to create a charity to give to the needy. I’d say there’d even be robot-factories that would just give away things for free the products they make by charity organizations if that’s the case. It would be more of a paradise than anything else.
If the concern is what to do with displaced workers who are now out of work and are angry…well I suppose that’s hard to say. I’d personally tell them to grow up and learn to do something else if their intention is to wreck havoc on the general populace to get some sort of weird revenge for losing their jobs. Its costly and expensive to change careers(I’m doing it right now myself and the process kinda sucks) but you have to be a baby otherwise.
“technology” is not some homogenous universal life improver. Most historical technology was made FUBU. It was designed to augment human workers. If technology were invented to replace the workers, say AI robots, this would be qualitatively different. Human labor could go out of use the same way Pentium II’s are out of use.
The reason we don’t have to be afraid of human labor becoming obsolete is because humans have property rights. People excluded by new technology can still trade with one another.
We might have to be really afraid of technology under a socialist regime. Henry Kissinger could replace all his workers with robots and let the proles starve.
I’m with you, but the anger of the masses cannot be discounted. IMO, violent revolution for the wrong reasons is something to be avoided at all costs, as it would be more detrimental to long-term freedom, even if you have to deal with some statism in the meanwhile in order to prevent things from going supercritical.
Oh, I have no doubts that it will. I will bet you 100:1 or more that we will not see an end to statism before technologically-driven superabundance. In fact, I would argue that technology is the main enabler of an-cap trends. This forum is an example of that. 
Ultima,
1. Do you agree that our brains follow the laws of physics?
If the laws of physics include those of biology, yes, in the sense that the way our brain functions is biological in nature. The brains of apes follow the same laws of physics that human brains do, but they both don’t operate the same. Neither do two human brains operate the same. In fact, to be more specific, I don’t think there are clear biological laws that can generalize the human brain. The human brain is an aggregate of chemicals, other physical masses, and then biological methods of interactions with one another. These develop in different ways depending on the experiences the brain, or whatever part of the brain is responsible for reception and interpretation, throughout the life of a human being.
2. Do you believe that there is something magical or mysterious about them?
In what sense of those two words?
3. If you don’t, then you must accept that the human brain, and everything that it can do, will one day be computable and artificially mimicked, even if by brute force alone.
This is a non-sequitur; it doesn’t follow from the previous two (arguable) premises. Human beings can’t even map out the method by which they themselves arrive at ideas. How can they give this function to a robot?
You are probably right over the very long run, but there are going to be a lot of unhappy forklift drivers and the like in the meantime. The effects could be much more profound than even the industrial revolution. The whole nature of rapid technological change is that it is very hard to predict the outcomes, but we can see that they will be rapid, and large.
Be this as it may, in an economy with rapid technological improvement, the structure of it changes just as rapidly. Meaning, just as some jobs are eliminated, others are created. The idea of long-term structural unemployment is simply untenable. There may be a decrease in the amount of hours an individual may believe are necessary to work, but as others have pointed out this is a natural byproduct of capitalism.
I kind of like this response. It is a decent rebuttal to the author’s assertion that we must tax these enterprises in order to provide consumption money for the disenfranchised, in the situation of a superabundant society. The robots have to agree, of course
It is the margins of the transition between scarcity and abundance where things get a little trickier.
Sieben, we only have property rights if we can enforce them and if they are respected. That would be something to get the robots on board with, for the day when we give them the keys to the world.
So it would be in the interests of the new capital owners to take care of the have nots. Anyway, I agree its a problem but I think it is easily faced.
Between seasteading and cyberspace, the days of the state are numbered. But yes we are using technology to beat the state.
Ok, I think we agree here.
In the sense that there is a mechanism of the brain that would be impossible to simulate in an infinitely powerful physics simulator. A “soul” could be an example.
It’s not a non-sequitur unless you believe that technology does not continually advance. Given enough time, we will one day have the computing ability to simulate a brain at the atom level in realtime, or lower if need be. We will also have the ability to scan in an actual-live brain, and reproduce it in this simulated environment. Understanding why the brain works or how it works is not required in order to be able to do this anymore than I need to understand how a computer program works in order to duplicate it or execute it.
However, we are also working on those aspects of the problem as well, and research is being done to move on from brute force to more intelligent methods of deriving how the brain functions.
I simply don’t accept that machines will never be more capable than humans in every possible aspect; as much as that is a nice thought to have, there is no reason why it must be true.
It’ll probably be easier for owners of supertech to engage the unwashed peacefully. Given that they already have hardcore economic advantages, making trade increasingly preferable to violence.
What about before the “lift” when there was only a “fork”? Would you have welcomed the “lift” or suggest to the worker with the fork to resist it at all cost?
Forgot to reply to this part. If the number of hours required decrease, then by all means bring it on. I won’t argue against that In fact, this is probably another place where government intervention favors unemployment instead of a reduction of general work hours.
In the sense that there is a mechanism of the brain that would be impossible to simulate in an infinitely powerful physics simulator. A “soul” could be an example.
I think that this statement is simply ridiculous.
It’s not a non-sequitur unless you believe that technology does not continually advance.
No, it’s a non-sequitur even assuming technology continually advances. It doesn’t necessarily follow that if technology continuously advances technology will therefore replace the human brain. That is a connection you simply have assumed.
We will also have the ability to scan in an actual-live brain, and reproduce it in this simulated environment. Understanding why the brain works or how it works is not required in order to be able to do this anymore than I need to understand how a computer program works in order to duplicate it or execute it.
You are missing the point. You might be able to reproduce a specific action. But, it’s is implausible to reproduce the mechanism by which the brain invents new actions.
I simply don’t accept that machines will never be more capable than humans in every possible aspect; as much as that is a nice thought to have, there is no reason why it must be true.
Likewise, maybe for you it’s nice to think that the computer will replace the human brain, but this is just as much of an assumption (and based on less foundations, at that).
*facepalm
Are we not already in an age of abundance where most human labor has been replaced by machines?? Who digs a ditch with a hand-shovel anymore? Even a tiny little 6 ft. ditch will be dug with a rented machine, not by hand.
Machines are always a means to an end. They are never the end in itself. I have often thought of how McDonald’s has nearly reduced their entire food production process to a mere mechanism. This has simply had the effect of making human labor more valuable. Hopefully, one day McDonald’s will roll out its first “burger kiosk” that is just an computer-controlled burger/fries assembly machine… you place your order, put your money in, then wait for your food to be dispensed and drive off. Think of all the human effort wasted in the cooking of burgers! What a savings it would be if humans could be relieved of the burden of having to cook their own fastfood burgers and could, instead, push that laborious task onto machines.
As for computers commodizing human intelligence, they were supposed to have become self-aware and subjugated humanity by now. Don’t hold your breath. There are deep mathematical reasons why computers will never replace programmers.
Clayton -
Why, because of the part that you italicized? We don’t need anywhere near infinite computational ability to actually simulate a brain; I was just making a point that everything in the brain is computable unless there is something, like a “soul”, that you believe is not computable and not scannable by physical means.
It is an assumption based on trends. Maybe it won’t happen, but there is no reason why it can never happen. What is your assumption that it can never happen based on?
How is it implausible to simulate a brain? We might be a far way away from even simulating a brain via brute force, but there is nothing implausible about doing it, given the computing power required to do so. There is also nothing implausible about reverse-engineering a brain and deriving algorithms from it.
It’s an assumption to state that we will one day have that computing ability, but it is not an assumption to state that given that computing ability and the ability to scan in a brain atom by atom, that we can simulate a human brain.
Computers have already replaced humans in plenty of ways. Unless you are telling me that it’s physically impossible to simulate a human brain, then there is nothing implausible about it. Is your position that we will never be able to simulate a human brain?
Brain simulation is neither here nor there. Let’s say we build a computer tomorrow that fully simulates a brain. Most of it would be useless to your end of economic planning (sensorimotor control, fight/flight reflex, etc.) but that’s beside the point. The interesting parts of the brain are the parts that help us plan, solve complex problems, and so on. If we could simulate these parts of the brain a million times faster than a live brain functions, we’d simply have a really fast brain. The problem of how to use that brain to attain human ends would still remain, unsolved.
Let’s say I use this new brain-simulation technology to found Brains, Inc. and for $1/hr. you can rent a super-brain that’s the equivalent of 10 ordinary human brains who know how to program. This would simply be the equivalent of you being able to hire computer programmers for 10 cents an hour. It doesn’t fundamentally change anything except the cost of thinking services.
Computers are already far more powerful than the human brain, in the sense that they can solve many problems that are extremely difficult for the human brain in a nano-second. Your computer can do long-division of thousand-digit long numbers in a matter of milliseconds, a problem which would take you a couple days to solve. Even if computers could solve every problem the human brain can solve - faster - that would not alter anything about the real world.
But one thing computers will never do is solve problems that the human brain could not solve, even in principle. If you think about it for a minute, it should be obvious why.
Clayton -
Ultima,
Why, because of the part that you italicized? We don’t need anywhere near infinite computational ability to actually simulate a brain; I was just making a point that everything in the brain is computable unless there is something, like a “soul”, that you believe is not computable and not scannable by physical means.
Like I’ve repeated over and over again, just because certain actions can be mimicked, doesn’t mean that the process by which these actions are invented can be mimicked.
It is an assumption based on trends. Maybe it won’t happen, but there is no reason why it can never happen. What is your assumption that it can never happen based on?
What trend leads to that assumption? The only trend you’ve brought up thus far is the trend of technological process. But, by that account I can also say that in the future an invention will prove God. This isn’t very meaningful, nor is it very useful for predicting the future. My claim that we will prove God in the future is just as valid as your claim that the human brain will be completely reproduced.
How is it implausible to simulate a brain? We might be a far way away from even simulating a brain via brute force, but there is nothing implausible about doing it, given the computing power required to do so. There is also nothing implausible about reverse-engineering a brain and deriving algorithms from it.
The human brain doesn’t work through algorithms. The human brain is not mathematical. I don’t think there is a clear relationship between the human brain and the development of ideas, other than the forces by which the chemicals and physical tissue interact. I don’t think there is one process by which this occurs, nor do I think that the processes are the same throughout the human body. If it were possible, in my opinion, it would have already been done, because we have a more or less clear idea of how the brain works.
It’s an assumption to state that we will one day have that computing ability, but it is not an assumption to state that given that computing ability and the ability to scan in a brain atom by atom, that we can simulate a human brain.
Yes, yes it is.
Computers have already replaced humans in plenty of ways.
Um, what does this have to do with what I’m talking about? Further evidence that you simply do not understand what I’m saying.
Is your position that we will never be able to simulate a human brain?
Yes.